When he married the rich Widow Custis, George Washington became the owner of two plantations close to Williamsburg and a water grist mill not three miles from the town. Samuel Coke, the Williamsburg silversmith, owned a grist mill, also water powered, less than one mile away. What information we have concerning Williamsburg windmills is limited to three fragmentary items. First, in 1723 William Robertson, clerk of the General Assembly, holder of a number of other government offices, lawyer, and land speculator, deeded to John Holloway four lots in Williamsburg, “being the lots whereon the said William Robertson’s wind mill stands.” [Illustration: _Post mill symbol, redrawn and enlarged, from the “Frenchman’s Map” of Williamsburg, 1782._] Second, during the Revolution an American soldier who kept a diary of his experiences mentioned being “near the windmill, in Williamsburgh” one night before the siege of Yorktown. Finally, an unknown French mapmaker, presumed to be in the service of Rochambeau, drew a very careful and complete billeting map of Williamsburg and the buildings in it. On this map appears a representation of a post mill just on the southern edge of the town. Beyond these three items the story of milling in Williamsburg has to rest on careful deduction, the cross checking of every pertinent fact, the following of every lead, the consultation of every source—in sum, on a mass of research. For example, evidence as to how the Williamsburg windmills functioned has long since disappeared. Because Robertson’s mill was within the city, however, it can be said with reasonable certainty that it operated as a custom mill, not a plantation mill. _MILLING AND THE VIRGINIA PLANTERS_ If not much is now known about milling within the confines of Williamsburg itself, a great deal can be related of milling in the larger expanse of the Virginia colony. For despite the late start of merchant milling in the tobacco colonies, the grinding of grain for export had become big business by the time of the Revolution. In 1766 Governor Fauquier noted in a report to the Board of Trade (albeit almost as an afterthought) that the Virginians “daily set up mills to grind their wheat into flour for exportation.” Such merchant mills, as advertisements in the _Virginia Gazette_ attest, were usually connected with a plantation. Advertisements for the lease or sale of other farm property repeatedly contained the phrase “convenient to church and mills.” A mill scheduled to be built near Robert Carter’s on Nomini Creek—too near, he thought—would be the twenty-fourth within twelve miles on the Virginia side of the Potomac, an area that included no towns.